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The Divisive Power of Humour: Comedy, Taste and Symbolic Boundaries
Using British and Dutch interview data, this article demonstrates how people from different social classes draw strong symbolic boundaries on the basis of comedy taste. Eschewing the omnivorousness described in recent studies of cultural consumption, comedy audiences make negative aesthetic and moral judgements on the basis of comedy taste, and often make harsh judgements without the disclaimers, apologies and ambivalence so typical of ‘taste talk’ in contemporary culture. The article demonstrates how, in particular, Dutch and British middle class audiences use their comedy taste to communicate distinction and cultural superiority. We discuss several reasons why such processes of social distancing exist in comedy taste and not other cultural areas: the traditionally low status of comedy; the strong relation between humour and personhood; the continuity between comedy tastes and humour styles in everyday life; as well as the specific position of comedy in the British and Dutch cultural fields
Measurement of the WW production cross section in p anti-p collisions at s**(1/2) = 1.96 TeV
We present a measurement of the W boson pair-production cross section in p
anti-p collisions at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV. The data,
collected with the Run II DO detector, correspond to an integrated luminosity
of 224-252 pb^-1 depending on the final state (ee, emu or mumu). We observe 25
candidates with a background expectation of
8.1+/-0.6(stat)+/-0.6(syst)+/-0.5(lum) events. The probability for an upward
fluctuation of the background to produce the observed signal is 2.3x10^-7,
equivalent to 5.2 standard deviations.The measurement yields a cross section of
13.8+4.3/-3.8(stat)+1.2/-0.9(syst)+/-0.9(lum) pb, in agreement with predictions
from the standard model.Comment: submitted to PR
Erratum to Measurement of at 1.96 TeV, published in Phys. Rev. D {71}, 072004 (2005)
A change in estimated integrated luminosity (from 226 pb^{-1}{\sigma (p \bar p \to Z)
\cdot}{(Z \to \tau \tau)}209\pm13(stat.)\pm16(syst.)\pm13(lum) pb